In 1950s, when the greats of Hindi cinema were busy with their nation building narratives and critiques of capitalism, a creative soul from Lucknow was busy casting a musical spell of irreverent romance. Over the years, film scholars might have ignored the fun and froth that Nasir Husain dished out to us but an upcoming biography by Akshay Manwani attempts to put Husain’s cinema in perspective and, more importantly, tries to find meaning in his glossy magic.
Akshay, like many of this generation, was introduced to Husain’s youthful writing through Jo Jeeta Wohi Sikandar . “The kind of connection it made with youngsters, you can’t make out that it was written by a man in his 60s.” As he discovered over two years, it was not the first time that Husain saw the future.
“Music, Masti, Modernity: The Cinema of Nasir Husain” (HarperCollins) reveals how Husain made us recover from the Gandhian guilt about fun and made chase an important ingredient of romance in Hindi cinema. In the process, Husain, essentially a writer, rewrote the image of one the biggest names of Hindi cinema – Dev Anand with films like Munimji and Paying Guest and when he got the director’s baton Husain created an image for Shammi Kapoor. For Dev Anand, he created a flamboyant and rakish persona that allowed the star to breath between his obedient Namoona and the darkish Baazi . And then moulded Kapoor from poor man’s Raj Kapoor to Indian Elvis Presley with Tumsa Nahin Dekha , established it with Dil Deke Dekho and Teesri Manzil — a film that he produced.
The pursuit of his ambitions was not easy and the ‘black sheep’ of the family or ‘shareer ladka’ as he described himself needed the nod of his maternal uncle Maulana Abul Kalam Azad to make a dash in the city of dreams. Husain’s personality, which reflected in his male characters, comes through in the foreword where his nephew Aamir Khan fondly remembers how at a time when cars didn’t have built-in music systems, Husain got a turntable modified and fixed in his car, and he along with kids would go on long rides listening to the Beatles.
In the Hollywood context, Akshay says, nobody is embarrassed about the big entertainment days of the late-1920s and early-1930s but here film historians run down or don’t analyse anything that is unapologetically fun. “Not just Husain, we haven’t given the respect and the critical scrutiny that the films produced by Filmistan deserved or for that matter works of Raj Khosla.” It was at Filmistan that Husain developed his idiom under the guidance of Sashadhar Mukherjee. There was a strong influence of Pakistani short story writer Shafiq-ur-Rahman and P.G. Wodehouse on his writing but the impish conversational tone that he developed was his own.
Akshay says Husain was fed up of hero-heroine falling in love within the first fifteen minutes of the film. He wanted to discover the fun of falling in love. “His protagonists, best represented by Shammi Kapoor, reflected the mythical Krishna side replacing the Ram’s image that was predominant till then.”
In his universe, the hero could be a drummer like in Dil Deke Dekho , where the narrative moves from one club to another. Akshay describes it his most important work and goes on to underline how a night club was not a space of vice for him. It was an anti-thesis of the Nehruvian narratives that Raj Kapoor mounted and the anti-West sentiment that Manoj Kumar’s films later promulgated. His hero could talk about money earned in a horse race and didn’t feel apologetic about it.
Of course, there was a certain aggression in the way Husain’s heroes pursued their love and Akshay dwells on the shades of stalking in his movies, but his overall impression is that it seldom crossed the line of dignity and grace. “His female characters were progressive and had a mind of their own. His leading ladies were seen in clubs and around swimming pools, and were not ready to accept the paternal choices as their life partners.”
In the music of his films, there is strong expression of female desire and femme fatales played an important role in story telling. Who can forget Monica singing ‘tann ki jwaala thandi ho jaaye aisey galey laga ja’ in Caravan , a film that brought gypsies in the mainstream space. Akshay reminds Majrooh Sultanpuri using ‘sajaoonga teri badan ki dali’ to describe a woman’s body in “Chura Liya Hai Tumne” in Yaadon Ki Baaraat .
Before that, Husain took the narrative literally out of the four walls of home and imbued buoyancy in cinematic journeys. His stories often took us to hill stations and more often than not the protagonists moved multiple cities through the course of the film. There was an element of cheating but who cared as long as the intrinsic logic worked. For him entertainment came first, logic could wait.
Many believe that after the initial success he repeated the same plot of lost and found. Akshay says for that one has to analyse his filmography in reverse to find how one was different from the other. “I agree that the first four films were similar but the man had the guts to say that he came with only one story from Lucknow. Once he said that people realised it.” Otherwise, they were eating out of his hands for the kind of playfulness that he created on screen was unparalleled and it emerged from his sense of humour. He once told Randhir Kapoor in jest that like the biryani that he serves at home, people love his stories. So why should he change them. Even Rajendranath, a usual figure in his films, was not a cardboard character.
Akshay goes on to add that it was not that Husain didn’t have a political side. It strongly reflected in Baharon Ke Sapne but it didn’t do well at the box office and Husain returned to his brand of entertainment.
Music continued to form the backbone of his productions till the end and his collaboration with Shankar Jaikishan, R.D. Burman and Majrooh Sultanpuri has withstood the test of time. The medley in Hum Kisise Kum Nahin remains a benchmark. Talking of experiments, Akshay compares the westernised qawwali in Hum Kisi Se Kum Nahin to Manmohan Desai’s more traditional one in Amar Akbar Anthony. He backed the experimental music with equally adventurous picturisation. If “Hoga Tumse Pyaara Kaun” was picturised on a moving train, his trick with hot air balloon in “Ye Ladka Hai Allah” is equally unforgettable. “If you notice, he carried this adventurous streak in dramatic sequences as well. Remember the growing up scene of Shankar in Yaadon Ki Baaraat . The camera does a 360 degree turn. It was not a dissolve or cut,” remarks Akshay.
In the ‘70s, Akshay says, Husain presented a counter narrative to what the angry young man represented.He reminds that in the decade of Amitabh Bachchan most filmmakers, who started their careers around the time Husain emerged on the scene, worked with Bachchan for different reasons but Husain steered clear of the wave, and still managed to stay afloat. The closest, he came to what Bachchan represented was in Yaadon Ki Baaraat where he collaborated with Salim-Javed who wrote Dharmendra’s character in Vijay mould. “The way he smoothly amalgamated his romantic musical universe with the brooding intensity of Salim-Javed makes it his most significant work,” says Akshay.
In times when fun is often treated as an alloy in popular culture with has many impurities attached, there is a hard to find a successor to Nasir Husain. Akshay finds shades of him in Karan Johar’s glossy universe and Imtiaz Ali’s road movies. But for me the picnic was over, once Nasir Husain packed up his caravan.
